


where the rivers led

by returntosaturn



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Modern Day, Newt lives with wolves, What else do I tag this?, detective!Tina, murder mystery?, no like I'm not kidding, non-magic au, wild!Newt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 07:51:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13970598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/returntosaturn/pseuds/returntosaturn
Summary: She’s been thinking alot about fairness...about justice. If any of that really matters or if the rationale by which she’s lived her entire life has been for naught. Credence hadn’t gotten a chance. The man in the woods—wherever he’d come from, whoever he could’ve been—would never even be given a taste of it. Perhaps there was justice enough in rest. In putting them aside, but not letting go of the ways she’s been changed by the both of them. It isn’t solid or tangible, but she can grow to live with it. It doesn’t save the world, but it means something for her alone, and maybe that is enough this time. Maybe it’s what she needed.// modern-day AU, non-magical. wild!Newt. Tina investigates Credence's murder in the upstate woods, but stumbles into something—someone—she'd never expected.





	where the rivers led

It is raining when she reaches the grounds where a ring of cabins stretch through thick, dense evergreen. 

The main house is impossibly warm and is flooded with the scent of cedar, hot coffee, and the clinging bouquet of cigars. Its dressed in dark woods. rich plums and blacks, opulent and rugged all at once. A pair of twelve point antlers are mounted proudly above the front desk that is nearly as wide as the foyer itself, leaving no room to slip past the man who guards it. 

The man has his shining black boots propped against the edge, a bemused finger pressed to his lips. He wears a black pearl snap, tailored expertly to his trim frame. His hair is cropped close at the temples, but swept back meticulously and handsomely from his angled face and straight brows.

When she steps through the door and shuts out the building storm behind her, she’s immediately aware of his presence, though he’s just as gloomy as the house built around him.

He sets wide, dark eyes on her, surveying her rain-speckled button down and the badge glinting at her belt. His posture straightens, slow and easy, boots thunking one after the other to the well-polished floor.

“Hi there. Um...” Tina starts, trying to push past the feeling that he’s trying to look through her. “Detective Goldstein, NYPD. They made arrangements on my behalf. You must be Mr. Graves...”

“Yes, I am,” he replies smoothly, leaning forward to prop his chin against steepled fingers, wide, dark eyes blinking at her. She’s never felt sized up by hotel staff before. A suspect, sure, but...

“Well. You know why I’m here then,” she says anyways, stuffing her hands deep in the pockets of her trousers. “A teenaged male was reported missing a little over a week ago. Last seen in the surrounding area. Probably alone.”

“I’ve seen it in the papers.” He leans back in his seat. “Sad stuff.”

“Yeah. It is.” She drops her head. “We’re hoping for a positive outcome.” 

Its the company line, or something like it. The best version of it she can manage.

“Take your time giving the place a once over, Detective. Though I haven’t seen any kid...alone or otherwise. I’m pretty strict about teens staying on the grounds without being accompanied by an adult. And I’m in the slow season. Not many people come out for weekend getaways when it's pouring outside.”

He tugs a long cord from beneath the collar of his shirt, a small brass key and some charm she doesn’t get a good look at dangling from the length. He unlocks a desk drawer and passes her the key to the cabin she’ll be inhabiting for the next week, or until Credence’s body can be found, whichever comes first.

“

The cabin is more than comfortable. Beautifully furnished in sleek, rustic woods and spotlessly clean. It's a luxury to light a fire and wrap herself in the thick knit blanket draped over the back of the sofa. She falls asleep with a case file balanced against the edge of the cushion.

She wakes to the mist-grey of dawn with a crick in her neck and stiff knees. She blames it on the rain, not the fact that she was too absorbed to haul herself to bed. As much as she denies it to herself, she’s useless without Queenie to tend to her. To tell her when to sleep. To remind her to eat. To make coffee in the morning…

Coffee…

The coffee machine in the small kitchen churtles and chugs with disuse, and produces a visibly thick black tar that’s tasteless on her accustomed taste buds. 

_ ‘I wonder when they’ll just insert an IV drip for you,’  _ Queenie had said.

She takes a thermos with her to map the edges of the forest, where the trees are thickest, where it is unlikely that any body would be dumped here...close to the hiking trails where it would be discovered sooner or later, even on the heels of an impending winter.

She veers off, trekking through the trees in the direction of the river. Even from this distance, she can hear it’s ceaseless churning. A gentle hiss cutting through the calm.

This place is entirely contrary to the City. But she finds it has its own rhythms. Its own soundtrack that is noticeably lighter, not weighing against her brain in a constant cacophony. It reminds her of camping with her parents, just after Queenie had turned six, when Tina had begged them to go ‘real camping’ for her eighth birthday. Real camping consisted of tents and s’mores, playing cards all through the evening, and letting Queenie share her sleeping bag when the night got too quiet. 

It is the last out-of-town outing she remembers having with them.

She’s lost to the memory, imagining she smells the sharp, heady scent of campfire in the trees around her when she sees it.

Sees  _ them. _

Two grey figures, knee deep in the gently bubbling stream, on the opposite bank.

Their pink tongues lap the water neatly, practiced, instinctual.

They’re beautiful, and she knows it must be a rare sight to see them calm and about their own business, not with teeth bared and fur on end.

She’s never seen wolves in person. Animals of any kind are a rarity in the City, obviously, and she has never had a chance to quietly observe.

But then there’s another  _ someone  _ that appears among them, crawling from the thick, entirely human and unmistakably  _ man _ . He moves to mirror his companions, crouching in the shallows, his hands cupped together on the surface of the water. His matted hair catches the sun like spun copper.

He raises his hands to his lips…

“Hey!”

Silence snaps into place. A breeze catches the thistle. The three figures on the opposite side of the stream glance up as one. She feels a shiver prickle its way up her spine.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” she shouts, but he does not respond. Neither him, nor the two silver wolves on either side of him.

The moment freezes like a still image, but for the stream gently rushing between them.

The next thing that strikes her is different. It is something she’s shied from, been trained to suppress and see past. But it bubbles up too quick and too fast to ignore.

She takes a step back, another, and then she bolts.

-

She’s halfway back to the trail when she trips and falls over a twisted root, face planting in the brush. Her palms burn like they’ve been set aflame.

She brings her knees under herself to push herself off, to keep running, but there’s the low rumble of something very much like growling very near behind her.

She twists and plants her heels, and comes face to face with the  _ man,  _ crouching low on the balls of his bare feet, hands flat in the dirt before him. She notices for the first time that he isn’t nude...he’s wearing a pair of ratty brown shorts. The sight of a wild man in actual clothing should almost be comical, but she’s too busy trying not to hyperventilate to give it too much thought.

The growling drops to a purr and she feels her breath pasting itself to the walls of her throat when he tilts his head.

“D-Don’t come any closer! I’m an officer!” she yells in vain, trying her best authoritative voice. It ricochets off the trees, but doesn’t startle even a bird.

Ragged, unsheared hair hangs over his brow. Blue eyes are fixed unflinchingly on her; not warning, but almost curious. Almost as if he were trying to work out some hidden question.

“I’m just leaving. I promise. I…” she whimpers just as he moves a hand forward in the grass.

A slow whine intones at the back of his throat and he moves forward again, close enough to touch the toe of her boot.

He does.

She flinches away with a gasp. 

He draws back, hand midair like a wounded animal. 

She isn’t sure if she should scream or run or stay put. The blood rumbling in her ears makes her feel rooted to the ground, muscles leaded and incommunicable.

There’s silence again. Stillness.

Then he shifts backwards, up onto his feet and draws himself to full height _,_ tall and lean.

Another pang of fear seizes her.

She takes a breath and blinks, ducks her chin so she won’t have to see his hand or his fist or whatever he’ll do to render her unconscious.

But nothing comes.

He’s gone, scurrying away into the trees, ducking down back onto all fours as he goes.

She scrambles to her feet without another moment to spare, snagging the sleeve of her jacket on a broken tree branch. She runs, legs and arms pumping, careful not to fall prey to any other roots or limbs in her path.

The long, clear tone of something very much like howl—mournful and slow and reaching—lingers in her ears long after she’s found her way back to the cabin.

-

Her dinner of a feebly prepared cold cut sandwich goes stale on the plate where it’s balanced on the railing of the porch.

She finishes her hot chocolate—her sister’s own blend that she insisted on packing for her—but she’s only half-present, thinking on the man in the woods, staring out over the edge of the porch at the wind playing in the low boughs. 

The matching scrapes along her palms can be indication of only one thing. She’s lost it.

She grips her mug tighter, wincing when the warm ceramic burns the sensitive skin.

-

The next morning, she redirects her thoughts and secures them on finding Credence. Uncovering what has happened. What she  _ knows  _ has taken place. What time and nature will reveal.

When she draws on her boots and steps over the threshold, she finds her forgotten sandwich is in pieces on the porch steps, roast beef gone, plate face down in the grass, crumbled bread left behind in a taunting trail threading towards the tree line. 

-

She doesn’t go there, back to place she’d seen him the day before. 

He isn’t her purpose. He’s better off as a figment and she’s better off pretending it never happened, she thinks while she patrols the riverbank in search of any signs of dark hair, a white tee shirt, trembling fingers that reach, reach out to her.

She has to find him. Has to close this chapter of both their lives. 

She has to know there was some kind of ending for him, however tragic or sad, that means he never again has to face that  _ woman,  _ if she can even be called such.

The woman that pledged to protect him, and brought more harm than good. The woman who had turned her face from him when he was most desperate for guidance. When he’d found himself knee deep in a decision that robbed him of the self-advocacy he’d never possessed in the first place.

The only clue they have is some strange symbol etched into a page in his notebook. A triangle, a circle inside, and a slash drawn down its center. A simple geometric sketch which could’ve been dreamed up by accident if it hadn’t been spotted all over the city already, carved into brick and inked on subway walls. 

She wonders if it’s bad of her to wish him deceased.

She knows, even in her empathy, it has been too long and things went bad too quickly to hope for a better outcome. 

-

She comes back empty.

Sticky with humidity, feet aching, head too full, she leaves a chocolate chip cookie on the porch railing that evening. Just to see what happens, she tells herself.

In the morning, its been replaced with a three-petaled yellow flower.

-

“Nobody? For three weeks?”

“As I said.” Mr. Graves slides his palms along the polished oak of the desk.

She sighs and shakes her head. “Sorry. I need to see your guest registry, please.” 

“You’ll need a warrant, I’m afraid.”

Its quick, and when she meets his eyes, she doesn’t find defiance, but some form of steely solicitude.

She swallows.

“Look, Mr. Graves.” She draws her eyes along the wood grain. “I know he’s not out there. I know...It's been a week. We don’t hold out much hope at finding him alive, but we’ve got reason to believe that what he’d been caught up in was nothing good. Some sort of crime ring, we aren’t sure. If there’s a chance that the person responsible…”

But Mr. Graves holds up a hand to stop her. “Kids disappear all the time in the City, I’m guessing? And I’m also guessing that most of the time, it just turns out that they’ve run away. You’ve got a vested interest in this one. It’s sad.” Mr. Graves nods sympathetically. “Maybe you got close to him on your beat through his neighborhood. Maybe you just feel that strange, inexplicable draw to his case because of the circumstance.”

“I never said I knew him…” she interjects sharply.

“It's perfectly natural to feel a connection,” he goes on, “You’re a kind woman. You want justice. Good traits for a cop. But our strengths do get the better of us sometimes.”

Her instincts flare, but her tone remains even. “Mr. Graves…I’m not going home without answers.”

He tilts his head, sets her with a look that might’ve been charming if she trusted him. “Then you should start looking then, shouldn’t you?”

-

She wants to leave. She wants to put this entire thing to rest and forget this had ever happened…

She wants to kick something.

It must be a fault written into her to get so invested in things like this. She wishes sometimes she knew better than to allow herself to trip over her heart all the time. She  _ knows  _ better, but it happens, and then she ends up here, in situations like this, with more secrets than what she came with.

A familiar figure—familiar only in the sense that she recognizes the tangle of his hair, the arc of his bowed, unnatural posture—is prowling the bottom step when she rounds onto the path leading to her cabin. The grinding of the gravel under her boots startles him, and his focus snaps to her as the initial flutter of fear in her heart settles to a quiet.

In an instant, he makes to skitter away, poised on all fours to dart back into the tree line.

“Wait!” she yelps.

The pitch in her voice startles even herself.

Slowly, curiously, he looks over to her, focused, unblinking through the mangled sheaf of his hair.

Her boot grinding into the gravel is too loud when she steps forward.

He doesn’t make a move. Not even a flinch.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you the other day…” she says quietly. “I didn’t expect to see you, that’s all. Wild wolf-men aren’t exactly common in Upstate New York. I guess neither of us expected...” She gives a shrug, letting the tension bleed out of her limbs.

He looks away, idly searching the ground for something, and looks back at her. She sees it again. That quiet wonder; that flicker of recognition he isn’t sure where to place.

She waits, watches.

Afternoon sun streams through the circle of trees, pleasant and warm. A breeze catches the spriggy curls of his hair, makes her shiver even under the stiff, sturdy fabric of her jacket.

“Are you hungry?” she says.

“

He crouches low, shoulders pinched backwards, a low warning thrumming in his throat.

“It’s ok. It’s ok. They won’t hurt you… Well, that’s not what they’re meant for, anyways. Look.”

She lifts the scissors and takes hold of a small bit of her own hair, just by her ear. She snips a few centimeters off and lets it fall, flicking the stray pieces from her fingers.

“See? That’s all I’m going to do. No big deal.”

Eventually, she wrangles him to sit on the porch swing. He goes easily, but the feeling of sitting—like a civilized person—is foreign, and mild panic catches in his eyes before he quiets. Once he’s calm, she takes her place behind him and begins.

She’s bad at this, but she doesn’t think it really matters. He looks healthier, more human even if the sides are a little too blunt and the top is a little ragged.

He wriggles for only a moment or two before giving in, calming under her hand and probably infers that struggling will present harm for them both. Scissors are sharp; it isn’t a difficult concept. 

She gives him her badge to keep his hands busy. He can’t hurt it anyways, and it catches the sunlight on its polished surface, shining proudly. He scratches a fingernail over the etched metal plating, then lifts it to his ear and scratches again.

“So you’re alone, huh? Well...not really alone, I guess. Just alone in a different way.”

She thinks on the dual nature of her statement for only a moment before continuing.

“I have a sister. Her name is Queenie. She’s more the matriarch between the two of us… She’d fatten you up quick. A real good cook.”

He doesn’t seem to be listening, now poking at a nail in the swing.

“But we took care of each other growing up. Still do. Our parents died when we were really young. So I know what feeling alone is like. Gotta do whatever you can to survive.”

She finishes up and sets the scissors aside. He brushes a hand over his freckled shoulders and then his new haircut that somehow hopelessly still falls into his face.

“Well, it’s better anyways,” she says and plants her hands on her hips, watching him rubbing at the nape of his neck, now exposed.

“I guess introducing you to the shower would be too much to hope for,” she says, more rhetorically than anything, for up to this point she has assumed he cannot verbally communicate. In English anyways.

“Well, you’re welcome I guess. Thank you for letting me…” She hadn’t really planned how to end the sentence, so it hovers unfinished while he stands and turns to place her badge gingerly on the edge of the porch swing.

“I’m pretty boring, so it might be better for you to…” she says, gesturing widely out towards the trees.

But he’s watching her again. Like he’s trying to solve a riddle. 

The sun is gone now, overgrown with more thick grey clouds and it makes his eyes look steely.

He reaches up, hesitates, considers, but this time she doesn’t flinch when his hand meets the side of her head. She gasps, but he isn’t deterred. His fingertips twitch in her short brown hair, and then move to his own newly trimmed, still unruly, coppery locks. 

He point to his eye with one fine-boned finger—she notices for the first time he has blonde lashes—and then points at hers, his fingertip a hair's breadth away from her cheek. 

He touches the tip of his freckled nose, his lips, and it’s an entirely human contemplative gesture while he ponders whatever it is he’s come to.

He takes a step away from her.

When he runs this time, its at full height, crushing the underbrush beneath bare feet.

She watched him go until the sound disappears with him.

Alone, she raises trembling fingers to her own lips, and looks down at the last bits of daylight glinting off the kitchen scissors.

-

Credence’s body is found bloated and grey at the bottom of the river bed. There is a pin stuck in the collar of his shirt, bearing the same symbol she’d seen in his notebook; the triangular shape enclosing the circle, almost like an odd-shaped eye. 

It strikes her immediately last place she’s seen it.

When Graves had unlocked his desk upon her arrival, there’d been something else alongside the little key…

Patrol cars descend in the quiet wood and light the forest with blue and red.

There’s the smallest hint of cloudy blue daylight by the time they’ve removed the body and booked Graves. He shoots her a nasty grin when he passes, flanked by two officers, and she thinks how off it looks on his face. As if it belongs to someone else.

-

The weather gets inanely colder, but at least it's dry now. Until the snow comes at least. She thinks about bringing a scarf or some long johns up with her, but he’s been this long without them, he probably wouldn’t know what to do with them.

Queenie prepares a picnic basket with little questioning. She throws her a wink while she’s preparing the sandwiches, but Tina rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

She parks at the edge of the property, a for-sale sign now hammered into the ground just outside of the main house. 

It takes awhile to reach the river, but only because she takes her time. 

She’s been thinking alot about fairness...about justice. If any of that really matters or if the rationale by which she’s lived her entire life has been for naught. Credence hadn’t gotten a chance. The man in the woods—wherever he’d come from, whoever he could’ve been—would never even be given a taste of it. Perhaps there was justice enough in rest. In putting them aside, but not letting go of the ways she’s been changed by the both of them. It isn’t solid or tangible, but she can grow to live with it. It doesn’t save the world, but it means something for her alone, and maybe that is enough this time. Maybe it’s what she needed.

She settles among the reeds, folding her legs under her and listens at the river’s gentle rush. 

It doesn’t take much time for him to find her. His hair is already a little longer, and she smiles at that.

He creeps through the thick, down towards her, then sways for a moment, deciding. He’s tall, taller than she remembered in her mind’s eye when he stands up straight and closes the distance between them on two feet.

“Hi,” she breathes when he settles back down beside her.

He whines at pokes a finger at her basket.

“Yeah, yeah, ok. Be patient,” she chides with a laugh and starts to unpack roast beef sandwiches, a pair of apples, fresh homemade brownies that are still warm in their foil casing.

He follows her lead, watching how she holds the sandwich, how she chews with her mouth closed, how she licks a bit of stray mustard off the pad of her thumb. Every so often, she looks over to see his eyes on her, wide and focused. 

She sets aside the last bit of crust and sighs. When she meets his eyes, he’s watching patiently.

She tries to smile but it falters so she lowers her chin.

“I’m not going to come back anymore,” she says after a beat. “I know you don’t understand that, but…I just don’t think it’s fair…”

The words catch in her throat.

She sighs again and reaches up to rub at her eye. She didn’t want this to be difficult. It shouldn’t be...

“I’m sorry…” she hisses. She blinks up towards the sky, and when her vision clears, she finds he’s shifted closer, just beside her, near enough to touch her though he doesn’t.

His eyes carefully track the tear that streaks over her cheek before she can wipe it away.

“They just...they wouldn’t be very nice to you out there. They’d be scared and confused and they might even want to hurt you.” She knows he can’t understand what she’s saying, let alone what she means. “I have to let you stay here.”

She hangs her head, looks down at his hands flat in the grass between them.

“I’m…” she starts, clamping her eyes shut to gather herself, but he catches her off guard and anything she would’ve said dies on her lips.

She starts a bit when rough fingers brush her cheek, but this time he doesn’t draw back on her reaction.

Her gasp sends a curl of steam swelling in the air between them.

She watches him now, enthralled at the depth of his gaze where its focused on the side of her face. A calloused thumb pushes a loose lock of hair behind her ear. The bit she’d snipped away with the scissors at the cabin; the bit that’s just that much too short and won’t stay put no matter how she tries to coax it down.

He’s memorizing her, she realizes, eyes flitting over her face, quick and sharp, mapping her.

The tall grass rustles when he shifts away. She tries to focus on the scatter of freckles on his bare shoulder when he turns, the edge of his jaw when he hesitates on looking back. She doesn't watch him disappear this time, she only knows that he does.

In the car, she tries to ignore the tug in her gut that isn’t sure what it wants. She blinks back her tears and squints through the afternoon sun dappled across the empty road. 

When she makes it home, Queenie already has the hot chocolate on the table and a fire going in the living room.

She doesn’t tell her, but she lets her curl into her shoulder like she would when they were girls, and in the quiet she feels more known, more certain, more understanding than she ever had before.

**Author's Note:**

> [allscissorsallpaper](http://allscissorsallpaper.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.


End file.
